Michael Crichton: Five Patients (UK 1995)

From the Publisher:
ER has become the most succesful television series in the world since CHARLIE'S ANGELS. Michael Crichton created the series from his own experiences as a medical doctor in the emergency rooms, operating rooms and wards of Massachusetts General Hospital. FIVE PATIENTS is Michael Crichton's true account of the real life dramas so vividly portrayed in ER. A construction worker is seriously injured in a scaffold collapse: a middle-aged despatcher is brought in suffering from a fever that has reduced him to a delirious wreck; a young man nearly severs his hand in an accident; an airline traveller suffers chest pains; a mother of three is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease.

Michael Crichton: Five Patients. Arrow, ISBN: 0099601117 (February, 1995), 246 p., £4.99.

Michael Crichton: Five Patients (USA 1994)

From the Publisher:
A construction worker in his fifties is seriously injured in the collapse of a scaffold... A middle-aged railroad dispatcher develops a high fever that makes him wildly delirious... A young worker nearly severs his hand from hishirm in an accident... A woman traveling alone has persistent chest pains -- and is treated by a doctor on a TV screen... A mother of three is diagnosed with a deadly disense...

Bestseling author of Jurassic Park and The Lost World and creator of the television series ER, Michael Crichtion, himself a medical doctor, takes us to the emergency rooms and consulting offices, operating rooms and patient bedsides at Massachusetts General Hospital. There, doctors, nurses, medical students, and technicians work to heal five patients, whose stories are told with all the suspense, technological detail, and excitement that have made Crichton's novels #1 bestsellers.

Michael Crichton: Five Patients. The Hospital Explained. Ballantine, ISBN: 0345354648 (October, 1994), 204 p., $6.99.

Michael Crichton: Five Patients (USA 1981)

From the Publisher:
HOSPITALS ARE ONLY HUMAN
Best selling author Michael Crichton draws on his medical training to give us first hand accounts of five true and poignant cases which reveal the near - miraculous proficiency -- and sometimes alarming inefficiency -- inside a major city hospital.

RALPH ORLANDO: His trip through the hectic and harrowing emergency room decided his fate and that of his family
JOHN O'CONNOR: Never sick In his life, his strange illness baffled experts, and proved that no treatment
PETER LUCHES!: Is simply "routine". He was rushed into a surgical drama that tested the techniques of modern medicine to the fullest.
SYLVIA THOMPSON: Chest pain at an airport introduced her to sophisticated Tele-Diagnosis by a doctor three miles away.
EDITH MURPHY: Misdiagnosed by a small hospital, her life depended on the speed and competence of an experienced staff.

Michael Crichton: Five Patients. A dramatic look inside a major hospital. Avon Books, ISBN: 0380573644 (December, 1981), 209 p., $2.75.

Michael Crichton: Five Patients (USA 1971)

From the Publisher:
If you've ever been so much as near a hospital, Five Patients is compelling reading...
Five patients, five human beings caught in the complex machinery of a large metropolitan hospital... Ralph Orlando -- in emergency, his heart stops beating... John O'Connor -- 108° fever from unknown causes... Peter Luchesi -- his almost severed hand is reattached... Sylvia Thompson -- sudden illness diagnosed over closed-circuit TV... Edith Murphy -- a guinea pig in a teaching hospital.

FIVE PATIENTS -- anatomy of a modern hospital by Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain

Michael Crichton: Five Patients. Behind the Scenes at a modern Hospital -- The Startling Human Drama! New York: Bantam Books, May 1971, 209 p., $1.25.

Michael Crichton: Five Patients (USA 1970)

From the Publisher:
Five patients, five actual cases of men and women in urgent need of medical help rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital in the past year -
To witness their treatment, to see how hospital practice is changing in the age of the science-technology explosion, the reader is taken into Mass. General, into the receiving room, into the emergency ward, into the operating theater, on surgical rounds, into private rooms and wards, as every kind of diagnostic or therapeutic equipment is put into action, as residents, interns, and senior staff diagnose, consult with each other, prescribe, and treat the cases of:

RALPH ORLANDO, rushed into emergency after a construction accident; his heart has stopped beating...
JOHN O'CONNOR, brought in at the point of death (fever °108) from unknown causes...
PETER LUCHESI, whose nearly severed hand is reattached by a team of surgeons in a six-hour operation...
SYLVIA THOMPSON, whose sudden illness on a Boston-bound plane was diagnosed over closed-circuit TV in the hospital's Logan Airport Medical Station...
EDITH MURPHY, the diagnosing of whose rare disease, lupus erythematosus, demonstrates the benefits of being a patient in a teaching hospital -- and the drawbacks.

To give the layman this unique inside look at modern hospital practice, the twenty-seven-year-old author of The Andromeda Strain (he received his M.D. one month after Andromeda was published) draws on the immediacy of his own experience through four years at Harvard Medical School and Mass. General. As Crichton reconstructs in detail the experience of the five patients, as he looks back into the hospital of yesterday and forward into new possibilities of care and eure, the reader gains an extraordinary understanding of modern medical practice, of hospital life and problems, of the hospital staff and its responsibilities, of the way medical stu-dents function and are taught in the hospital, of why costs are skyrocketing, of what lies ahead.

Five Patients is Michael Crichton's first work of nonfiction. In it, that incredibly complex and rapidly changing organism, The Hospital, is explained -- with the same incisive, understandable concreteness that made the inner workings of our space-biological program real and clear in The Andromeda Strain.

Michael Crichton: Five Patients. The Hospital Explained. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, June 1970, 231 p., $5.95.